Modern networking continues to provide an improvement in communication and information access. As an example, in-house data centers, associated with a particular entity of interrelated group of users, could contain a large number of information technology (IT) resources that are interconnected through a network. These networks are configured in different ways depending on implementation-specific details such as the hardware used and the physical location of the equipment, and depending on the particular objectives of the network. One common type of network configuration is a local area network (LAN). In actual practice, a typical LAN will include large numbers of computer systems, switches, routers, load balancers, firewalls, and the like.
In one embodiment, a LAN is established and/or managed by having a technician physically connecting devices according to a network plan. That is, when a plurality of resources is to be used in a network, the technician will connect the devices physically and install the correct software into the devices by hand. Each time a modification to the network or software is necessary, the technicians must manually connect or disconnect the devices or manually install or change the software to perform the modification.
To resolve the manual modification process, many modern networks also have in-house data centers which include technicians working from a network operation center (NOC). The technicians issue commands to control the deployment of servers and to control the supporting infrastructures, such as disk logical units (LUNs) in a disk array, network switches in the LAN, and the like. For example, a technician in the NOC may organize a virtual LAN (VLAN) including a plurality of the resources within the LAN network. In some cases, the collection of computational devices contained in these VLANs is referred to as farms. The network is referred to as a VLAN because the actual network (e.g., the wiring, cables, etc.) is not reconfigured, instead, the technicians in the NOC will virtually assign (e.g., with the use of software) the components specific to the VLAN. Thus, the physical network remains the same, but the actual utilization of the network can be divided into distinct LANs virtually.
For example, a user may request a farm including a server, a LUN, and two ports on a network switch. The technician in the NOC then inputs the request into a utility controller. The utility controller will automatically configure and deploy the computational devices to establish a farm of devices for the user. The user's farm would then be active as long as the user requested it and/or utilized it. After the user was finished with the farm, the technician in the NOC would input the cancel request into the utility controller and the resources would be reabsorbed into the resource pool to await reassignment. Therefore, by utilizing the NOC and the resources available in the LAN, a plurality of VLANs can be established without rewiring the network.
However, in a utility computing environment, like most other complex IT environments, for the secure use of applications it is prudent to uniquely be able to authenticate every managed node with a unique authentication credential. In most IT environments, for a secure framework, the setting up of authentication credentials is performed manually by at least one technician and therefore requires physical access. The applications themselves, although able to provide most of the authentication structure, are unable to provide an automated manner to distribute the initial authentication credentials in a secure manner. In static IT environments, this manual process is utilized because it is only a one-time setup cost. However, utility computing environments, as described herein, are allocated dynamically. Moreover, the resources may not have any local storage but instead be dynamically associated with storage allocated on a storage array network (SAN), and the entire resource allocation and setup process is automated. Therefore, it is impractical to use a manual approach of credential distribution and setting up of authentication schemes used for normal IT environments in a utility computing environment.